On a sunny 74-degree day this week in Tempe, Arizona, as most other college hockey teams were snowed in or coping with freezing temperatures, Arizona State made a surprise announcement that it would join NCAA Division I next season.

Arizona State’s bold move to elevate its club team drew a swift reaction.

“I don’t want to overstate it,” said Mike Snee, the executive director of College Hockey Inc., an independent marketing arm for the sport. “But other than the creation of hockey itself, there hasn’t been a single event the sport can build off more.”

The Sun Devils’ promotion to NCAA status opens college hockey to the West and to a metropolitan area of 4 million people, and it gives the NCAA a 60th Division I program.

The ultimate goal is the creation of a Pac-12 hockey conference. Currently, Arizona State plays in Division I of the American Collegiate Hockey Association, the top division of club hockey, where it was ranked No. 1 with a record of 18-1-0 entering the weekend. Arizona and Colorado play in the same division. The other Pac-12 teams play in ACHA Division II, except for Oregon State, which has no hockey program.

Arizona State’s athletic director, Ray Anderson, hired in January after more than seven years as the NFL’s executive vice president for football operations, said the Pac-12 supported the move.

“The hope is that Arizona State will tip the dominoes to get some of the northern schools, in Washington and Oregon, and our folks in California who have programs and probably don’t want to see us competing when they’re not,” Anderson said.

Hockey would provide valuable content for the 2-year-old Pac-12 Networks, which are wholly owned by the conference members and reach 40 million homes.

Arizona State has sponsored club hockey teams for more than 25 years. Last season, the fourth under coach Greg Powers, the Sun Devils went 38-2-0, winning their first national championship.

Powers, a former goaltender who balanced his full-time job as managing partner of an executive search firm in Scottsdale, Arizona, while building his hockey program into a perennial power, will coach the Sun Devils as they enter a new era.

“We now have a responsibility to make this work,” he said.

With the addition of Arizona State, there will be about 1,200 roster spots in Division I hockey. By comparison, Division I basketball has 4,500 roster spots (351 teams), and football has 7,500 roster spots (252 teams).

Next season, the Sun Devils will play club and NCAA Division I teams; in 2016-17, they will play a full Division I schedule. Anderson said that if Arizona State could not secure a hockey conference membership, the program would remain independent.

The Division I program was financed by a $32 million gift, the largest in the university’s athletics history for one sport, from Don Mullett, the father of a former Sun Devils player, and an anonymous donor. The gift will pay for the program, including 18 scholarships, for at least 10 years. It will also finance the addition of a women’s sport so that Arizona State is in compliance with Title IX.

For more than a year, an informal group interested in expanding college hockey has been working to identify teams that might be interested in joining Division I.

The group includes Bill Daly, the deputy commissioner of the NHL, and Joe Battista, a former coach who helped guide Penn State into Division I in 2012.

Snee and Battista said they believed Arizona State’s move would encourage more universities to upgrade their hockey programs. In fact, Snee said, within 24 hours of the ASU announcement, he received emails or calls from people asking for help to “make it happen” at universities they support.

Until Pac-12 hockey becomes a reality — the NCAA requires six teams for conference play — only two leagues are geographically appropriate for Arizona State: the nine-member Western Collegiate Hockey Association and the eight-member National Collegiate Hockey Conference, both based in the Midwest.

Battista, who said he had watched the news conference from Tempe with tears in his eyes, knows what lies ahead.

“Greg’s going to be jumping into the deep end,” he said, chuckling, “but at least in Tempe, Arizona, he’s got a pool.”